A (74:40)
Earliest evidence of making fire. So I'm just going to read the. Read the abstract. Fire making. And so this is actually the. This is only available online, linked through Scientific American, which is how I first ran into this piece. And so you can get the entire. The entire article if you want to read it, but you have to link through Scientific American, which is strange. Firemaking is a uniquely human innovation that stands apart from other complex behaviors such as tool production, symbolic culture and social communication. Controlled fire use provided adaptive opportunities that had profound effects on human evolution. Benefits included warmth, protection from predators, cooking, and creation of illuminated spaces that became focal points for social interaction. Fire use developed over a million years, progressing from harvesting natural fire to maintaining and ultimately making fire. However, determining when and how fire use evolved is challenging because natural anthropogenic burning are hard to distinguish. Although geochemical methods have improved interpretations of heated deposits, unequivocal evidence of deliberate fire making has remained elusive. Here we present evidence of fire making on a 400,000-year-old buried land surface at Barnum in the United Kingdom, where heated sediments and fire cracked flint hand axes were found alongside two fragments of iron pyrite, a mineral used in later periods to strike sparks with flint. Geological studies show that pyrite is locally raised rare, suggesting it was brought deliberately to the site for fire making. The emergence of this technological capability provided important social and adaptive benefits, including the ability to cook food on demand, particularly meat, thereby enhancing digestibility and energy availability, which may have been crucial for hominin brain evolution. That's a lovely little story. What the abstract doesn't include is that before this find, archaeologists only had confidence in being able to place the control, creation, control and maintenance of fire, of maintenance of human or hominin created fire to about 50,000 years ago. So this research takes it back to 400,000 years, which is an Eightfold increase in what we think. Homo sapiens didn't exist at that, that point. The likely the human ancestor that they invoke here is Homo heidelberg Ensys. I think I may have dropped a syllable there, but sounded good to me. And you know, we weren't fully human yet. We were, we're definitely on, you know, on the lineage that those critters were on the lineage that would Become human a couple hundred thousand years later. A couple other things that they say here that maybe warrant additional, additional nuance are there is evidence that humans were harvesting from natural fire, like lightning strike and using fire a million years ago or so. But being able to use fire that you find, and presumably in not particularly stable conditions when you've happened upon wildfire and create and maintain stable and controlled fires is way different. And the difference between we've started using fire a million years ago and it's only 50,000 years ago that we can actually create and maintain controlled fire versus a million years to 400,000 years ago is a very huge difference. And furthermore, the idea that fire, so their list of benefits of fire is pretty lovely. Warmth, protection from predators, cooking and creation of illuminated spaces that became focal points for social interaction. That's the campfire that we speak so much about in Hunter Gatherer's Guide and, and elsewhere. But with regard to cooking, which they come back to at the end of the abstract, Richard Wrangham and now many others. But Richard Wrangham, primatologist, I believe he was the first to propose, but he certainly was the first to really explore deeply the hypothesis that cooking meat was one of the big transition points in human evolution. Because meat that is not cooked not only does not have the energetic value, the resource value, the caloric and nutritional value value that cooked meat does, but it also requires so much chewing. And I have, I did not go back and look at, look at his, his data on this, but I believe that he calculates that human diets that are largely consisting of uncooked meat require 10 to 12 hours of chewing every day, which obviously gets in the way of various other things such as talking and other things. And so his argument is not just that cooking meat, which is for which fire is necessary, benefits us nutritionally, energetically, but also socially, because suddenly we have our mouths freed to do many other things with them.
